“We won?”

“We won”

“We won?”

“We won!”

“We won?”

“We…wait a minute, why are we doing this again? Are you trying to be funny?”

“What does that mean?”

“That means you are an id…?”

“Shut up! We won, let’s enjoy this!”

Many of the spirits within the hive cheered, ignoring the two bickering spirits. None of them had expected You-Who-Are-Not-Bear to lose but it did…and yet they still managed to survive. The hive was delighted by its victory but for some of the spirits, they realized the victory was not without cost.

“By the 99 Gods, great that we won but we wasted a lot for the victory.” One of the spirits said.

“Yeah,” another spirit happily agreed. “Good thing we didn’t waste the energy for nothing!”

“What we waste?” someone asked. “We won!”

“Yes but we wasted a lot of energy on…what do we call that wolf?”

“Smoke Wolf; Smoky, Wolfie…?”

“Let’s worry about that later,” one of the more sensible spirits said. “Let’s see what we gain from all those wolves and humans that died?”

The hive focused on the dead and found the information to be as perplexing as usual. There’s also a lot of it. 7 humans and 10 wolves; the hive quickly decided to forego looking at them individually and looked at them as a whole. After all, the hive figured it didn’t matter whether the knowledge it gained was from the humans or the wolves.

Classes- Warrior, Mage, Alpha

Skills- Enhanced Hearing, Shadowstep, Scattered Arrows, Magic (Ice), Magic (Fire), Magic (Light)…

“Wait, wait, wait,” one of the spirits said. “Why are we doing this?”

“What do you mean?” another spirit asked. “We need knowledge to survive so of course we need to review all these new knowledge.”

“But why?” The spirit asked again. “We can’t do anything with them?”

“Yes we can,” the spirit argued back. “We created You-Who-Are-Not-Bear and Smoky with the knowledge. By the 99 Gods, the only reason we managed to create Smoky was due to the knowledge of mana we gained from the mage named Jundal so of course we need to review...”

“Wait, are we calling it Smoky?”

“Does anyone knows what ‘By the 99 Gods’ actually means? What is a God?”

With those questions, the hive went into discussion overdrive on what a god actually was? A discussion that was thankfully ended when an irate spirit posed a simple question, “Can we get back to the main point here?”

“What’s the point?”

“The point of reviewing these knowledge!”

“That’s my point!” the spirit said. “What’s the point? Sure we got the information from the human but the human is dead. Our enemies are dead. Even if we now know magic of ice, fire, and light…what do we do with them?”

“Uh…he has a point. Why are we doing this?”

“So that we can create new creatures to protect us!” an exasperated spirit said. “Or do all of you truly think Smoky would never be defeated?”

“Again; are we calling it Smoky?”

“Who is this idiot who keep asking that stupid question?”

“I think it’s one of the air spirits!” someone said. “They are always kind of flaky.”

“Hey, air spirit here. We were the ones who save us; Smoky was created by us!”

“Also, we are a hive. If we are idiots, so are all of you!”

“Hey, you air flakes only managed to win because we nature spirits soften them up for you!”

“Soften them up? What you guys do? You only killed 2 humans! We got 5!”

“Well the only reason you…” Thus started yet another regulative discussion/argument conference of the hive!

After a long while, the spirits decided it was useless to argue anymore and most of them went from being argumentative to sulking. The rare moment of peace was broken when one of the spirits asked, “How are we going to replace the energy we lost?”

Suddenly, the spirits understood they got a problem on their hands. They used a lot of energy by creating a new creature and now all the wolves were dead. Sure it gained a lot of energy with all the deaths but in the long run, just 5 wolf pups won’t be able to sustain the hive. Then one of the spirits got a bright idea.

“Why don’t we try what the human Jundal said?” One of the spirits said. “Why don’t we try absorbing the spirits around the mountain and then convert it to energy?”

“What do you mean?”

“The human said all humans can gather the spirits and convert them right? Why don’t we do that? Let’s try to gather all the spirits around here?”

“We are also spirits,” one of the other spirits said. “Won’t we be converting ourselves?”

“Can’t we just convert the new spirits? The spirits in the hive currently can stay in the hive.”

“We are spirits, they are spirits, and how do we differentiate between us?”

“Besides there are so many of us in this hive, how would we ever know if one of us disappears?”

“Does it matter?”

“Uh…”

“Even if we get converted to energy, once the energy is released, won’t we go back to being a spirit?”

“The human Jundal never said that?”

“But it does make some sense,” one of the spirit thoughtfully said. “It’s like a circle. Maybe that why spirits are always around!”

“Aren’t the rest of you forgetting the most important thing?”

“…Which is…?”

“Does anyone have a better idea?”

With that, the argument was over. The hive focused on the area around the entrance of the tunnel. It found that the area it could sense had grown bigger. That’s good. It had no idea what to do, so it did what it was good at. The hive let its instinct take over.

The hive began to “call” any spirits within the area to the tunnel. Slowly but surely, the mindless spirits outside the tunnel began to drift towards it, answering a call none of them could understand. If there was any human in the area, he would have noticed a sharp drop in spiritual energy. For the hive?

The hive began to feed.